Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by mano price offering you high quality cables at everyday low prices all with a lifetime warranty monoprice also has adapters keyboards headphones and even gaming monitors click the link in the description for more information or visit monoprice com hey guys welcome to Paul's hardware today is a very special video because I have a brand new SSD here from Intel this is the Intel 750 series SSD first-ever nvme consumer drive available on the market 1.2 terabytes just an insanely fast drive pretty much the fastest drive that you can get right now if you're looking at the consumer side so to help me talk about this new product from Intel I have JJ from Asus yes what JJ is here welcome JJ thanks for being here today JJ as you guys might knows until the Asus Technical Marketing Manager we have many names we call him dr. Asus the the Prince of perspicuity thank you thank you thanks for being here but why are you here JJ what does Asus have to do with this new intel SSD you know pretty much the section just started off with a conversation right I've reached out to you because I'm really excited about this you know asus has always been somebody that's at the forefront of performance innovation and design and supporting the latest generation standards so you know we were at the beginning when the first set of 6g implementations came to the market we are at the beginning for first USB 3 USB 3.1 Thunderbolt and so many others you know storage related technologies and when Intel first kind of came to us that they were really looking to kind of set a new precedence and push forward with nvme which is the standard in terms of the protocol and the interface that helps to replace the current HCI protocol we were like 100 percent we want to be part of that we want to work with you to help to make sure that we can have a hundred percent ready solution with you guys providing all the awesome work that you guys are doing in terms of the controller the high quality validation the NAND all that great stuff that you're bringing to the table and then we can bring our expertise of course in motherboard design the interoperability and the validation and all the work that we're going to need to do to be able to make this seamlessly handshake to bring you ultimately a combination of course having the motherboards to support these awesome SSD solutions that Intel's available not only with the 2.5 inch version but also with the PCI Express adding card version so so that's pretty much where does until why don't work with the established reputable top-tier board manufacturer like asus to make sure that everything worked together yet like you said testing validation because there's lots of different possible scenarios configurations that this drive might be set up in but let's uh let's let's go let's talk some headlines for right now because if you guys are into SSDs and you know what SSD specs typically are especially if you're accustomed to SATA rev3 SSDs in those specs the specs and things will blow you away we already mentioned 2.4 I'm sorry yeah 2.4 gigabytes per second reads that's correct yeah writes are about in the 1.2 gigabytes 1.25 yeah and even those actually specifications to be honest they're a bit conservative when Intel was actually doing the initial kind of validation and the performance analysis testing was still with early generation firmware that hadn't been finalized and fine-tuned and at this point you're definitely seeing that actually in real-world testing and synthetics we're actually getting over those markers so that's kind of its kind of a lowball number actually yeah it's let's say it's a conservative number so you actually I wouldn't be surprised to see even greater levels of performance and some of the already testing that we see we actually were getting to point you know 2.5 2.6 2.7 gigs worth of read throughput you know on the right side you know 1.3 almost 1.4 you're just talking about totally monster numbers and keep in mind that the really exciting thing is that this is leveraging 18 channel flash architecture right that they have in here that comes from their data center their enterprise series basis is these so you have an impressive level of performance that they're bringing to the table with it being a native nvme controller which is the other big point okay I mean you know historically every SSD we've been looking at has been limited by the ACA that HDI protocol an interface that is on your additional SSD so you know the highest numbers you could see is going to be no 500 525 maybe 500 50 megabytes and then the only way we can get higher than that would be through some form of raid combination which in itself doesn't always fall for perfect scaling so nvme can leaves behind all of the trappings and hurdles that you had to run through that were really established for mechanical spinning hard drives that sort of thing it's an older standard it's very it's actually very long in the tooth we're talking about you know at this point you know over ten years that's a long now so especially with everything advancing it's crazy that we're still using essentially this older mechanism which still could offer is a great performance I mean the best ssese on the market are still using HDI so it's not like it's a bad specification it's just not purpose-built for flash but I think Before we jump into that getting back to what you were talking about we got those really big Halo points and you know it's a PCI Express gen3 by four interface okay so that's an itself that it's just as crazy massive bandwidth and by the way what I keep picking up and holding because I think it's fantastic is this little drive here which is the 750 series 2.5 inch version and it's thick it's 15 millimeters thick but this is a 2.5 inch drive yeah this is also available in direct PCI Express trim this is going to actually interface in a really unique way via MDOT - and we're going to show you guys how this one works there's another one in the system that JJ has over here which is just direct PCI Express which might be a little bit simpler if you don't have MDOT - correct but we're also going to go over everything you need to to make either one incisions work and plug it in and work because there are some requirements there but I want to keep hitting these Halo points or talking about uh input/output operations percent yes so these are just monster numbers we will talk about the read once again conservatively you're talking about four hundred and forty K so that's just insane I mean then you take a look at even high performance nearly raid configurations you're talking about 100 K 125 to a maybe 200 K right but here you're talking 440 K and once again I and some of the real world testing that we're getting at this point with a final firmware in place we're seeing an excess easily a 450 K in terms of the read on the right side you know I'm conservative again about 290 K okay you could even be looking beyond that so just overall truly monster numbers and then a latency performance also which isn't a measurement that's usually kind of associated with SSDs it's significantly brought down as well so you're going to get huge improvements in that regard we've also got you know power loss protection that's built into this unit as well so you get you know that safeguard in terms I have not only big capacity with great performance and that ultra high throughput but you also have a safeguard mechanism that's built in there and and rounding it all out you got some performance consistency that bringing over from the data center environment to help to make sure that as you full this drive on you know and you're utilizing it over time you're going to help to maintain that high level of performance so even if you've got 70 80 % of the capacities you're not gonna have any slowdown yeah you can still get a really ensured level of consistent performance which is really important because performance consistency sometimes isn't realized by users that as they fill their drives over time if they're not necessarily have a controller and a firmware architecture that's purpose-built to maintain that performance you have to generally over-provision a drive so you could sometimes take 10 15 20 percent of your drive and you're losing that well here definitely this is going to be a premium drive but at that same time you won't have to worry about over provisioning you'll be able to maintain a lot of that performance of this drive is purpose-built for ok so those are kind of the halo talking points for you guys and if you're not impressed yet you probably don't get excited about SSDs and that's ok but not everyone necessarily geeks out about this type of subject movable holy bootable yes and that's the last thing so yes you can take this plug it into your computer if you have the right hardware right now and you can boot directly off of it which is a limitation often when I hear when you're talking about especially a new protocol like this yeah a brand new drive sometimes it's more limited in its actual application but I really like that Intel and working with asus has done as much as they have to make this drive as usable as it is granted there are some interesting ways that we're going to connect it I think yes I think you guys are going to like it though because it's pretty kind of mad scientist II I feel like it's really cool like JJ has explained to me like they've done some stuff that's a little bit out of spec but it was just to say like hey we have all this technology right now how can we kind of put this all together to give consumers or drives it just blows away their expectations when it comes to performance but it's also usable and functional for for what you might want to use it for so guys are going to be doing a little bit of on on the fly be rolling for you because we're shooting this the day before launch and I want to post this tomorrow so um forgive me if it's a little rough around the edges but I wanted to give you guys some closer looks here so JJ let's start off talking about compatibility if somebody is watching this video and like this is the best thing ever and I want it now what do they need other than presumably at least in a suit exciting and saber-tooth motherboard okay so that's an awesome question it's a little bit loaded so first and foremost remember one of the big things that we pointed out originally is that this is a purpose-built solution for the highest level performance so it's PCI gen3 by 4 in terms of the requirement to be able to maximize that performance okay so as you know right now with z97 phase platform it's an awesome chipset great CPU but we are a little bit limited in terms of the total number of PCIe lanes so optimally most users that are on the x99 chipset are going to be the most suited to probably be able to enable the solution ok it's because the number of PCI Express lanes that they have available to them so in terms of compatibility the sabre-tooth x99 which is literally going to be shipping and bayed available almost in lockstep with the availability of the Intel 750 series whether it's the adding card or the 2.5 inch version will have a shipping UEFI that is MBM you ready now this is extremely important without the UEFI you will not have the ability to correctly have these drives work in their complete and normal functionality whether it's from a post and boot functionality as well as from a performance standpoint so you do want to make sure to have an asus board that has that UEFI in place to be able to ensure that best-in-class interoperability compatibility and performance now the z97 series of motherboards we have already all released UEFI in place to give them full nvme support ok so if you want to drop in the PCI Express card you're going to be good to go 100% you'll get all that performance that we talked about along with all the features of that drive but keep in mind that you're going to need to do it in probably like the second PCIe by 16 slot so if you're somebody that was targeting people possibly like an SLI configuration you would be essentially eliminating that possibility because you're going to need to go directly in that option now some of the motherboards if you look in the detailed manual information will generally tell you if maybe like the third piece a slot will be accessing CPU lanes from excuse me gen 3 lanes from the CPU but traditionally usually third slots on z97 boards will usually be connected to the PCH so since the PCH is far more limited in terms of its PCI link connectivity because it does it through the PCH as lanes that are enabled which are only gen 2 you're going to have a lot lower throughput okay now this drive because it's native me architecture because it's more efficient because it offers reduced latency higher pedal ISM and just a huge amount of improvements in terms of the command chain even at operating at a slower performance we'll give you a better experience than you would have from a traditional SSD or traditional raid configuration with normal HCI basis is that I don't want better JJ what the best you want the best so for people that want the best that's where the x99 solution will come into play okay so with x99 far less to worry about if you drop in the adding card because you've got tons of extra lanes you can probably drop it into the third slot and still help us select configuration and you're rockin and rollin and you're good to go but always make sure that the slot that you're using can leverage CPU lanes as opposed to lanes that would be lets say provided by your your PCH or that our Gen 2 enabled now where things get interesting is what we've talked about in the hyper kit module so I don't know if maybe we want to reference that guy but this is where things become a little bit more interesting so when Intel but just to sum up so far we're talking x99 from Asus yes and we're talking z97 from a suit and then maybe you guys are working on other stuff I know you didn't say this just for anyone who's curious maybe maybe z87 we don't want to talk about that too much yet yeah we are going to be working on technically it shouldn't be an issue to enable Pete the adding card support of course you have far less solutions on that our MDOT - based Georgia sans e87 because mSATA was still in kind of in trend that's what you saw Moysey 87 boards so pretty much on the 87 it'll be the focus at getting nvme support hopefully a lot with x79 no guarantees as if yet will project those timelines later out but right now if you want it z97 x99 for sure okay and then I asked JJ early about AMD side as well and just long story short there keep your eyes on the asus pc DIY website where i'll be posting updates as they're available again that's sort of a maybe wait-and-see kind of situation right and of course definitely with Intel there right now on both the mainstream chipset as well as the ultra high-end enthusiast chips that they have native gen 3 support work that's not necessarily the case on the Asus I guess some and then of course you want to be plugging in if you're using that PCI into a PCI slot that's giving you a direct connection to the CPU and nothing that's going to the PCH or something like that correct now if you don't want to use that PCI slot though and we've already been showing off the 2.5 inch drive we have a 2.5 inch drive we have a connector on it you guys have probably never seen before yep it's very well it's not that different from like like a SAS connector maybe just bullies I'd say SATA Express at Express yeah it looks kind of like a fast connection but what this connector does is it actually allows the drive to connect to an MDOT 2 port yes they're using this what is this little device so that is called our hyper kick so that's a special module that we design develop to essentially allow you to interface with this sf-86 39 connector to what pretty much looks like a mini SAS type connector it's already been used in the data center environment but that's so essentially what we have at play so we'll have a cable that will excuse me I cable it's already included with this drive that will allow you to go ahead and connect the hyper kit to this and then that interfaces in with the x99 board and is able to leverage the PCI gen3 by 4 interface and when I was talking about mad scientist II stuff earlier this is kinda what I was talking about because you have one connector here another another connector there but it's allowing you to make use of the MDOT to slot in the motherboard and then you have you have this little guy here this little cable right yep and then this connector table it was this actual plug called again so that's you can call it a mini SAS nice yeah and then the other end is your sf-86 39 based connection 86 39 and then that plugs into the drive right just like so and then it's got a little another little lead coming off of it with the SATA plug so you can get extra power to the drive yeah that is required because of course this only handles essentially all the data so this is required to initialize and actually have to drive correctly work so you plug that in and then you just run that over to your motherboard and as you can see or maybe you can see when I cut it in the future it plugs into the M naught 2 and then your drive is connected yep you're running % and you have full 100% PCI gen3 by 4 based performance for that 2.5 and drive like the performance from the 2.5 inch is pretty it's going to be the same as the PCI Express it's the same exact thing so you have no compromise in that performance and the great thing is also if you guys are kind of wondering this part of the reason why I wanted to have this type of flexibility support with this type of drive - is that wall X 17 X 19 is purpose-built for this you know ACS may be coming to the market at a later time frame with smaller form factor xi9 solutions where if you have more restrictions on the number of PCIe slots that you physically have this allows you to have smaller form factor systems where you might not be able to use a PCI Express adding card but you still want to have this amazing high performance or even if you guys might be aware like our z97 maximum 7 impact that actually has a by for Gen 3 PCI M database interface on the back yeah so you could interface this guy into that impact board and have that primary graphics card installed right so no room for an adding card but you could still have this ultra high level of performance enable to you that's pretty something like a mini ITX now just from a practical perspective it's is a bit higher than it just slipped out to drive so bear that in mind when it comes to compatibility with graphics cards or that sort of thing but I just I really love this this type of innovation and the way that you guys have just like if you fit it in there and if kind of frigging works so that's really cool um so that's essentially all you need right now if you want to use this drive yeah there'll be a little condom really actually everything has been because there's a driver that's built into this because it's a native UEFI base device which that's another little Kabat is this only supports native u-ace value based insulation which that's ok because if you're probably building into the system you got to you if I comply a motherboard like an ACS board graphics card you know optical drive your if you're still using that I can of course this and ideally you want to be utilizing with the windows 8.1 operating system to be able to make sure that you have to continue any consistency to have everything seamlessly work but there's nothing that you need to do it's pretty much transparent and seamless like you would use a traditional SATA base SSD that's using the HDI protocol they're good to go now there's a couple of parameters in the ua 5 that if you want to tweak it for the best post and boot performance you can go ahead and tweak those and maybe we'll show you those guys but beyond that not too much to do it's a pretty straightforward process i'm still trying to figure out what your reference was to a micro ATX Asus x99 board but yes let's take a look at that JJ ok ok JJ so we're now in the UEFI of the x99 see I'm saber-tooth x99 and so we're going to do a quick little where we're talking about optimization for nvme drives yeah this is pretty much just the way to optimize your UEFI to make sure that it is going to have the most effective post and boot time and this would actually also be recommended for any current HDI base drive that is you if you if I compliant okay okay so pretty straightforward all we're going to do is I move over into other boot and from there we're just going to want to set the drive to hard drive only essentially we just have a blue drive early because we only want to boot just that one single volume okay you want to disable essentially all pulling thicker for USB support this doesn't mean it disables any USB ports they're just not pulled at the beginning of the UEFI being initialized okay we want to go ahead and have the next boot after power loss set to a fast boot we want to eliminate any set post time delay so set to zero seconds and then probably one of the most important parts is here we want to go to CSM compatibility support I'm not going to get into this this is a very complicated topic but essentially it just means that it's acknowledging that the board only has the latest in generation type of hardware that supports UEFI okay and what we want to do is if we have it it'll look something like this you can manually set everyone to UEFI only which would be an option but you can also just go ahead and bypass all that and just disable any type of CSM support so essentially any legacy support okay and once you've gone ahead and done that you'll pretty much be set at that point you can hit f10 and you will have the most optimized parameters to have the fastest pose and fastest boot now for users that are utilizing the hyper kit there will be one thing that you would want to jump into which is you would want to go into that PCH storage configuration select that and hit enable to the hyper kit support and beyond that you would just go ahead and Afghan and you'd be good to go suta for that's it that's how you turn on the hyper kit mode specifically if you're using one of these with a packet that's it okay next up we're going to jump into the operating system and we wanted to show you guys some performance numbers yeah just in case you didn't believe us earlier and then also maybe like some real-world yeah a little bit of anxiousness much workflow example so um let's talk about whose it while we're waiting for the boot nevermind it's already booted up uh let's talk about who this drive is built for right because we were just discussing this we might as well continue discussing it pretty much I think the easiest way to look at is if you're somebody that was already going to be making investment and the best SSDs that were on the market and you were definitely looking at array type configurations this is a solution for you regardless of whether you're into gaming whether you're into content creation whether you're computation or analysis or any other kind of varied workflow it is pretty much just a better option than you're doing any type of rate JJ was suggesting that that gamers would want this drive like especially maybe the 400 gig one which is a little bit more more cost-effective and I was starting to argue with and like JJ gamers don't need that and he kind of argued against me and then changed my mind which JJ is very good at doing so I'm going to leave this question to you guys gamers out there who are currently gaming especially if you're already game on an SSD would you be interested in say a 400 gig version of this drive if it could make a significant impact on game load times and especially things like little stutters and hiccups that you might get in game from having to pull stuff off the disk let us know down in the comments section below but for now we have crystal dis Marc yeah and as a special crystal this yes correct and you will be actually able to download this version directly from the website but this is an important point and actually we talked about this a little bit before but mbm e actually requires actually a new form of software to really be able to acknowledge how it can work and how it can maximize the throughput that it has available to it especially when you benchmark it because traditional base benchmark applications are really designed for HDI base drives so they can't really saturate the drive correctly in terms of showing us the full real throughput so if you want to benchmark this type of solution you want to have optimal either something like IO meter where Intel will be working to release actually a guide to show you how to quickly tune it so that if you want a benchmark in NBA v solution you can use that or if you want a little bit more simple solution crystal this mark has already worked directly with Intel and details work with them to be able to fine tune their application to have it be updated to be able to benchmark correctly okay yeah so from here pretty much what we want to do is oh we're going to leave it three in terms of that just to give us a little bit less variability in terms of the performance set we'll go ahead and set it to four gigabytes in terms of what we have there and we'll go ahead and let it run through its performance so keep in mind that of course the highest level of performance would come from this drive of course being a standalone let's say a storage volume as opposed to running the operating system operating system is always going to take a little bit overhead but one of the great things that you have inherently with this is that there's significantly reduced overhead because it's mdme there's a lot less things in that whole chain as far as storage that the NAB controller and then from there the operating system have to work through to be able to give us a better performance so that's one great aspect of that one of the key point to is you want to make sure that the nvme driver is installed okay to be able to ensure that you get the best performance now it's not required for it to work and you look at great performance but you'll have significantly reduced performance numbers without the npm e driver installed and where would that just be available directly from Microsoft no that's actually mph drivers directly supplied by Intel Oh directly from Intel okay so it pretty much will come available to drive so you can see right here we've already reached 2.7 gigs and then 1.3 gigs on the right so utterly just monster performance and if you remember when we initially talked at the inception of this video yeah we said the number was actually what it was point five two point three or four even is actually is the radius specification so you're getting an extra three hundred megabytes that's ready that's for free yeah that's for free because in fact now order today you get an extra three hundred megabytes per second has already done that's like I'm three hundred megabytes per second like three four years ago that's like the fastest performing SSD you may be a little bit higher than 300 but yeah let me go back like what excited yeah it was it was yeah I was a little bit faster than that but think about it like this from perspective if somebody almost didn't just gave you 300 megabytes for free on a current SATA 60s sd and it went from 500 megabytes to working at 800 megabytes yeah you would be doing backflips be pretty excited right so the that you just kind of get it for free and the fact that Intel has been able to refine and make improvements on to the firmware and even have it operating more effectively it's fantastic and you know this also gets to another point as it's finishing off these numbers you can just see that you know across the different types of loads that we have here we're just getting some insane speeds but performance consist see is another really big hallmark of this drive and something where that also gets back to when we talked a little bit about different usage models that helps to ensure that the performance that you have is maintained throughout the entirety of the drive which is really important because if I start off having really fast low times or have really fast installation times or I have faster responsive experience for my system I don't want that to grade as I'm filling the drive up more and more which is something that people on mechanical hard drives you never really thought about right because more or less the drives kind of performance was pretty much the same more or less yeah but on an SSD that's actually not the case as you fill it up with a lot of different types of traditionalist as these that don't have targeted performance consistency built into their firmware and how they're designed you can have actually a lot of performance that the only way to compensate for it would be over provisioning but um we can see overall you know this is a quick just synthetic wrap up but just pretty insane numbers yeah yeah that's really impressive all around and again guys remember if you get this drive don't get through the normal version of crystal this mark yes you need the special version that's nvme compatible yeah and pretty much there's no other traditional benchmarks that are out right now that are really suited for in terms of pure synthetic testing so if you're like an advocate of a tow and stuff like that hopefully what time you'll see updates of that but right now it's pretty much I Oh meter as I've been updated since like 2010 yeah I feel like it's like Oh storage never changes all right but here's our numbers there guys two thousand seven hundred maker bytes per second reads one thousand three two megabytes per second writes the 4kq depth thirty-two numbers are also quite impressive alright one last demonstration that JJ has set up and this is just a video that we're going to play back for you guys but it's it's a demonstration of this drive in action specifically using Adobe SpeedGrade yeah so pretty much what we kind of did here was we took essentially a 4k file and input it into Adobe SpeedGrade and what we're essentially allowing you to do is see what would be the kind of restrictions that you would have if you use the traditional very high speed SSD so we use the Intel 730 series SSD which is nothing to snuff out I mean it's a very high quality high performance out of 6g SSD but it could really barely sustain being able to do color grading on one single 4k video frame and ultimately what we're able to show you is that we can not only do two but even actually the point of doing three which is really the way you would want to have it work when you're doing actually color grading and lighting grading because you want to be able to see those two different sources at the same time right and you want to be able to scrub yes being able to scrub but while your video editing is like so important and that's why I love really fast SSDs to store my my actual footage on that I'm editing off of so this demonstration again just simply put it's going to show three 4k images that are all up on the screen at the same time they're being scrubbed through to do color correction and to match them and to show that you know frame a and the size then there's also going to be fraps running that actually shows you the frame rate okay and so you want a course ideally have that frame rate not really drop because that helps to maintain the fluidity of the workflow as you're actually in the editor rear and the color grader and I think that both of us can agree that regardless of how you feel about maybe different aspects of enthusiast usage that this is one of the really key areas that for content creators you know professional rendering applications for anything like that this is where you really see the solution just coming into its own and profit just an awesome level yeah this is this was the thing that JJ showed me where I was like I need one I need one I don't even I don't edit in 4k I really don't I can shoot 4k my lx100 does 4k but I don't shoot in it very often because like setting up the whole workflow storage space all that good stuff that you need for it is becomes a lot more it's it's four times as difficult yep so to speak as 1080 recording so being able to do this three 4k streams off of one drive that's one drive can you raid these together JJ not not as not yet yeah that's obviously probably gonna be the next coach how many of these can we then wedge together to make some crazy thing like that but but even keep in mind that you know um even if you were to do four SSDs in a raid you could equal these numbers you'd have to do that through some form of specialized add-in controller card because the DMI link that exists on the PCH is saturated about 1.5 gigs so it's impossible and on top of that you would are also run into controller issues it would be less efficiency you'd have more overhead because this Drive you know 18 channels of flash with that custom 9 control it's purpose-built to offer this versus what you would traditionally have with normal SSDs where there they're such you're trying to scale them into offering that peak performance and there's a lot of other little pieces in the pie that affect the overall experience all right well guys that I think is going to wrap up this video thank you for sticking with us I know it's been a long one but we wanted to share this information with you JJ now thank you so much for stopping by awesome do you okay JJ just hit me up he like called me yesterday's like I'm gonna be in town do you want to do this and I was like yes come here let's talk about this so guys once again this is an intel SSD 750 series it's available in the 2.5 inch trim like this one it's available as a PCI Express Drive available at one point two terabyte capacity and 400 gig capacity yep and there's going to be an 800 gig yeah coming coming out little coming in the future so check it out it should be available now on the links down in the description down there while you're down there hit the like button let JJ know that you appreciate him coming by and sharing all this info and um thanks for watching yeah and it oh yeah watch watch JJ's stuff too yeah thank you uh if you have any questions on any of the issues points or any other things like that I'll be watching this thread so I'll definitely try to come back and answer in the comments but you can also make sure to check me out at PC diag stress calm beautiful thanks so much for watching guys and we'll see you all in the next video hello everyone and welcome to well I almost said welcome anyway it's just being here with JJ's sorry all the time like old times